Holy hell, what a year for music. I've tried to keep my nominees lists short in recent years, but this time ... not gonna happen. I did work to move as many down to my Honorable Mentions list as I could, though. Here goes!
Nominees
Adrianne Lenker -- Bright Future
Charlie Parr -- Little Sun
Future Islands -- People Who Aren't There Anymore
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings -- Woodland
The Innocence Mission -- Midwinter Swimmers
Loma -- How Will I Live Without a Body?
MJ Lenderman -- Manning Fireworks
Original Cast of Stereophonic -- Stereophonic (Original Cast Recording)
Sierra Farrell -- Trail of Flowers
Waxahatchee -- Tigers Blood
Honorable Mention
Andrew Bird and Madison Cunningham -- Cunningham Bird
Billie Eilish -- HIT ME HARD AND SOFT
Billy Strings -- Highway Prayers
Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Nathan Salsburg & Tyler Trotter -- Hear the Children Sing
Hurray for the Riff Raff -- The Past is Still Alive
It’s Sunday morning at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival and something isn’t right.
The early birds are perched from the merch tents to the far end of the Museum. It’s well past time for the gates to open, as they always do precisely at 10, each day, each year, so the diehard folkies can flock to the Quad or the Fort to secure their best blanket positions. But this morning, the gates and the guards aren’t budging, and the rumors on the merch side is that it’s all Lana Del Rey’s fault. On the Museum side, those rumors are confirmed as her voice carries over on the bay breeze from the Fort Stage.
The diva, it appears, has the nerve to be sound-checking.
It’s unprecedented. For folkies already perplexed or even peeved by her place in the weekend’s lineup, the delay — which someone squished nearby in the crowd tells us is kind of a trademark of hers — is further proof she has no place here. The spirit of the Folk Fest is all about the music, from the morning sets to the closers, not all about Lana.
Eventually, Lana Del Rey is ready, and, because she says it can, Day 3 begins.
Seven hours later, I have had at least five servings of Del’s Lemonade, not exactly the official drink of the Newport Folk Festival but close enough.
So when Lana Del Rey finally takes the stage — after another delay, and to the sounds of screaming fangirls somehow piped through the speakers — I’m sugared up and ready for anything.
I liked Video Games well enough when it first came out, and I’ve been digging her new record, in anticipation of this set. I can’t legitimately call myself a fan. But this evening, I am up for grabs.
Later I’d hear some folkies actually complain about this, but she’s brought a fairly elaborate stage setup — and dancers! This kind of choreography at the Fort is basically unheard of, but it doesn’t feel out of place 24 hours after Jon Batiste barbecued on the same stage. And while it’s not exactly Bob Dylan plugging in his electric guitar, it’s refreshing: Lana sprawled out on a piano; Lana reflected in a mirror as she combs her hair; Lana dragged off the stage at the end by the male members of her dance troupe.
It’s no wonder David Lynch is a fan: Her songs find space to be both artificial and heartfelt. I can’t tell how much of a diva the diva really is. And I love it.
I know they think that it took somebody else
To make me beautiful, beautiful
As they intended me to be
But they're wrong
I know they think that it took thousands of people
To put me together again like an experiment
Some big men behind the scenes
Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my songs
But they're wrong
That night I drive back from Rhode Island, along back roads that twist and turn in the darkness, roads that are almost pitch black when my brights aren’t on. My wife sleeps next to me in the passenger seat. Lana’s record, “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd” — my 2023 Album of the Year, beating out boygenius and Sufjan Stevens — keeps me company, providing the lovely and sometimes surreal soundtrack for the journey.
It might be the perfect way to listen to this record: wired, thrilled by the past three days, running on adrenaline and Del’s, every once in a while taking a sharp turn a little sharper than I’d have liked, imagining the car careening off the guardrail into the woods. Not long after Lana pleads, “fuck me to death, love me until I love myself” and asserts “it’s not about having someone to love me anymore”, there’s her preacher, sounding like he’s being surreptitiously recorded by Lana’s iPhone, imploring us not to live a life of lust, to appreciate the love and the family that we have. Later, she is taken in by candy necklaces even though she knows they’re superficial. And then Lana leaves everything behind because “when you know, you know” — then sings a love song she wrote for her boy Jack Antonoff’s wedding with the same lyric.
You know, twists and turns.
Eventually we get to my parents’ house, turn off the car, and quietly walk inside and upstairs to not wake up the kids. There’s always at least one thing — usually many things — that keeps me coming back to Newport Folk every year. This year there was Lana Del Rey, who for a time seemed determined to keep it from starting. Only to say later playing the Fest was a lifelong dream — and then blowing it up.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)
2022: Sylvan Esso -- No Rules Sandy
An undeniable highlight of each summer is Unwinnable’s can’t-miss coverage of the Newport Folk Festival. Yet in 2022, it was nowhere to be found.
Did Unwinnable sit out a year that included legendary surprise performances by both Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell? Did the Rookie of the Year lose a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dance with the Wife of the Year to Joni’s performance of “Amelia” — which happens to be the Wife of the Year’s name (and his ringtone for her)? Did Unwinnable not shed a single tear during any of this?
No! Unwinnable was there! Unwinnable danced! Unwinnable cried! Unwinnable did not write about it!
It’s time to rectify that. Because something else happened at the most recent NFF — Sylvan Esso debuted their as-yet-to-be-released and previously-unheard album — “No Rules Sandy” — for the first time. They performed it in its entirety, as we danced under a blazing hot sun. And guess what? It's my 2022 Album of the Year.
Amelia is also the name of the voice of Sylvan Esso, Amelia Meath. Leading into her performance I had been wondering why so many musicians insist on dressing in unseasonably warm attire at these shows. Newport is not a place where one would be judged for cargo shorts. And so when Amelia Meath took the stage in a suit jacket and bra, she’d already won me over. When she removed the suit jacket, she became practically heroic.
She needed the fresh air. As I said, it was hot that day. I was covered in dirt from dancing in the dusty ground in front of the Fort stage. Amelia Meath was under cover and clean, but she moved like it was her first and last show, and her husband, bandmate, Nick Sanborn (the Sandy in the album’s title) made his bleeps and bloops with just as much enthusiasm.
I’m a latecomer to Sylvan Esso’s music. I had “Ferris Wheel” on repeat heading into Newport, to the point where my two boys started requesting the “knees are bruised” song in the car. And while there might not be a song on “No Rules Sandy” quite that infectious, many come close — like “Didn’t Care” or “Sunburn” or “Alarm." There’s also arguably my favorite track, or at least the one that initially drew me in, called “Your Reality” which the duo has described as being a mashup of two very different ways of seeing the song. The result is splendid and not only suits the lyrics, but the album itself, a less-than-highly-polished post-pandemic parade of quickly written and recorded songs separated by short in-studio doodles and even a voicemail message from Mom.
The cover, too, is just the track list — black type left-justified on a white background (in iTunes the song titles disappear and reappear on a loop). It’s clear my inaugural recipient of the Executive Producer of the Year Award wasn’t consulted, though perhaps that’s for the best. The mixtape mashup of “No Rules Sandy” doesn’t have the gravitas of the Album of the Year runner-up — Shearwater’s quiet but powerful “The Great Awakening” — but it’s a ton of fun.
Listening to it, Unwinnable is right back at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival. Hearing it for the first time with everyone else. Crying to the "The Sound of Silence." Hugging the wife as a legend performed in front of a crowd for the first time in years, and for the first time at Newport since the 1960s. When it comes to the lineup, or the set lists, there are no rules at Newport. Not for Sylvan Esso last year, and certainly not for the other artists delivering unforgettable surprises.
We didn’t write about it then. Now we have.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
2021: Bo Burnham -- Inside (The Songs)
Anais Mitchell — Anais Mitchell
Bjork — Fossora
Hurray for the Riff Raff — LIFE ON EARTH Shearwater — The Great Awakening
Sylvan Esso — No Rules Sandy
Warpaint — Radiate Like This
Honorable Mention
Alvvays — Blue Rev
Arny Margret — Intertwined (EP)
Big Thief — Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You
Bonnie Light Horseman — Rolling Golden Holy
Caamp — Lavender Days
Goose — Dripfield
Sharon Van Etten — We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong
Taj Mahal & Ry Cooder — Get On Board
I’ve been wanting to write about Bo Burnham’s “Inside” for months. But I couldn’t quite figure out what to say about it. It’s more performance art than a comedy special, and every time I breathlessly recommend it, I get the sense people aren’t entirely eager to fill a bowl with Bugles for 75 minutes of sometimes zany but increasingly dark songs by a privileged white dude — “self-aware about being a douchebag … but self-awareness absolves no one” — on the pandemic, depression, aging, race, climate change, the evils of the Internet, and basically just the whole fucking world falling apart around us. We have long been wanting nothing more than to throw open our doors and breathe fresh air again. Meanwhile, Burnham sings, “It’s a beautiful day to stay inside.”
But now I have my excuse. It’s December, and every December — as my reader knows — I use this space to write about my Album of the Year, something I’ve been naming for nearly 30 years now. In those 30 years, the closest to a “comedy” record winning was John Linnell’s 1999 “State Songs.” But when I listen to this year’s runner-up — Lucy Dacus’ brilliant “Home Video” — it fills me with intense sadness. I needed a little more to laugh about. “Inside (The Songs)” though, well, it hits so many different notes, all of which in some form or another capture the time in which it was written, recorded and filmed — by Burham, alone in a room. (A room, recently discovered by internet sleuths, in the “A Nightmare on Elm Street” house.) And while it sometimes flirts with being an extended Weird Al video or a vanity project, it ultimately becomes something much more. Five years from now, much of the novelty likely will have worn off; I might not want to listen to songs about FaceTiming my mom, the joys of sexting or white women’s Instagram posts anymore, but those tracks, front-loaded at the top of the show, serve more like appetizers.
As the music continues, and gets darker and more complex, the more it feels like it’s actually — surprise! — an Album of the Year contender. Ultimately, I realized, it isn’t just a contender, but my winner.
If I hadn’t decided that already, it was cemented further when last year’s Album of the Year-winning artist, Phoebe Bridgers, released a cover of Burnham’s “That Funny Feeling” for charity. Not only did her understated cover version work outside the context of Burham’s record, but her tacit endorsement of “Inside” — and the anthemic quality the song takes on when she performs it live, the audience singing along — validated what I already believed: that this record is more than just the sum of its jokes.
The second track, “Comedy,” is a tongue-in-cheek, self-effacing take on the futility of what Burham is trying to accomplish. “Healing the world through comedy — making a literal difference, metaphorically.” In the bridge of the same song: “If you wake up in a house that's full of smoke/Don't panic/Call me and I'll tell you a joke/If you see white men dressed in white cloaks/Don't panic/Call me and I'll tell you a joke/Oh, shit/Should I be joking at a time like this?”
But it ultimately becomes clear that he isn’t just joking at a time like this. “30” has him despondently watching a digital alarm clock strike midnight as it becomes his 30th birthday. “Shit” is a club track that parodies pop hits about happiness designed to make you dance and morphs them into a song about depression, turning top 40 tropes on their head. “Welcome to the Internet” laments a carnival world of technology where we are inundated with “a little bit of everything all of time” and where “apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.”
“That Funny Feeling” is about that world ending, and it feels like complete non-fiction. Yes, it has playful rhymes in it, but the lines that stick out are profound: “The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door” and “Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more to go” — which build up to an outro of: “Hey, what can you say?/We were overdue/But it'll be over soon.” In this context, it might not always be comical, but it’s almost comforting.
And there’s then “Goodbye” — the climactic song before the special’s last over-the-credits tune, the comparatively hopeful “Any Day Now” — in which some of the earlier motifs return, and he promises to “never go outside again.”
There is also a challenge to his audience, even though he immediately undercuts it: “Hey, here’s a fun idea/how about I sit on the couch/and watch you next time?/I want to hear you tell a joke/when no one’s laughing in the background.” It’s at once a riff on one of the show’s key themes — that the outside world exists only as a mine for material to take home, alone, and share online — but also seems to herald the end of comedy as we know it.
After the song, in the special, Burnham’s door opens, and he is blinded by light as he steps outside. Birds chirp. But the light is revealed to be a spotlight and it’s nighttime. An unseen crowd applauds. And then: The crowd begins to laugh uproariously as he turns around and tries, in vain, to rip the now-locked door open and get back inside.
For a beat, right before the words “the end” appear on the screen, we see him inside again, watching this play out, projected onto his wall. We see his bearded face up close. He looks deadly serious. And then ... he smiles.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
2020: Phoebe Bridgers -- Punisher
Practically every time we saw Phoebe Bridgers in 2020, she was wearing a full-body skeleton costume.
On her album cover. In her videos. In her remote appearances on late-night television. In her one-off performances — one of the worthiest among them a quiet cover of Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” recorded in a London church. In each case, she’s sporting a classic black suit of white skeleton bones, marking this time of perpetual Halloween.
In her video for “I Know The End,” she’s wearing the skeleton suit while nearly drowning in a bathtub. At one point, she climbs out of the water and steps dripping wet into a locker room — where in each locker hangs the same skeleton suit, one after another after another. She has, it seems, an endless supply.
“I Know The End” is the stunning finale of Phoebe Bridgers’ sophomore solo album “Punisher” — my 28th annual Album of the Year. “Punisher” was released amid a deadly, incompetently mismanaged pandemic and raging civil unrest over the continuing murder of Blacks by an out-of-control police force. Its original release date was discarded in deference to Juneteenth.
Though “Punisher” was written and recorded in 2018 and 2019, its mix of hope, sadness, irony and a lingering sense of dread feels inspired by current events — even as they are still unfolding today.
Those of us quarantined at home have watched helplessly as the body count grows, hoping it won’t take us, too — or our parents or grandparents. That it won’t keep our children out of school any longer or force us out of our jobs. The only thing we’ve prayed to lose this year is our psychopathic president.
So Bridgers’ Halloween fashion, all things considered, made a ton of sense — even down to simply wearing the same comfy outfit every day. Why change your pants for a Zoom call, why do laundry, why try to put a fresh scent and unwrinkled polish on what for many was the worst year in America they’d ever seen?
Make no mistake, “Punisher” is a record worthy of any year. “DVD Menu” starts it with an orchestral foreshadowing, only to be reprised at the end of the record, bringing the haunting full circle. “Garden Song” has one of the most sublimely lo-fi guitar hooks you’ll hear, a pulsing heartbeat from under a blanket of snow. “Kyoto” (like other tracks on “Punisher”) touches on the ludicrousness of being a touring musician — how finding yourself in an alien land, far from the comfort of your bedroom is not always all it’s cracked up to be. “I wanted to see the world / Then I flew over the ocean / And I changed my mind.” Later, in “Chinese Satellite” Bridgers sings, “I've been running around in circles / Pretending to be myself / Why would somebody do this on purpose / When they could do something else?” Heard in 2020, traveling the world, performing songs over and over — as absurd and as strange a calling as it might be — seems very much worth doing on purpose, especially when you can’t do it anymore.
The title track — an ode to the late Elliot Smith — is both a song about fan obsession and an earnest tribute to a dead musician. A love song to a dead person you admire works anytime; it especially works now. There is also, fittingly, a song called “Halloween,” which features a purposely tasteless joke about living near a hospital, and sucks the joy from the holiday by focusing its limited powers on trying to conjure one final flicker out of a dying relationship.
There’s so much more to love on “Punisher,” but let’s go back to the finale: “I Know the End” contains the most telling and memorable moment on the record. As the album approaches its climax, Bridgers is riding down the highway in her car, screaming along to an “America First rap country song” with her windows rolled down. Bridgers sings:
The billboard said “The End Is Near”
I turned around, there was nothing there
Yeah, I guess the end is here
Yes, this might sound tongue-in-cheek — a wink-wink chem trails reference and an earnest wish to be whisked away by aliens from earlier in the record is also consistent with surviving our time of alternative facts and unending conspiracy theories. But the record never faces fear more head-on than as the song and album concludes with a chorus of voices singing “The end is here” in unison as the “DVD Menu” reprise swells beneath.
As you listen, you are free to choose whether to laugh or scream along with her. She does both in the closing seconds. Vaccines are coming but we’re still dying, and in numbers greater than before. We’ve elected a new president for 2021 but the current one’s dangerous mental health issues will continue to poison the country for the foreseeable future. Which is why — even on the best days of this Halloween year — it’s hard to deny what we’ve all wondered sometimes: Maybe the end really is here.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
2019: The Lumineers -- III
Your 2020 Album of the Year nominees and honorable mentions:
Nominees
Bob Dylan — Rough and Rowdy Ways Bonny Light Horseman — Bonny Light Horseman Fiona Apple — Fetch the Bolt Cutters The Innocence Mission — See You Tomorrow Loma — Don’t Shy Away Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher
Honorable Mention
Adrianne Lenker — songs Jonathan Meiburg — Mangled Classics Laura Marling — Song for our Daughter Laura Veirs — My Echo Michaela Hrabánková and Doležal Quartet -- Mysliveček's Oboe Quintets and String Quartets Sturgill Simpson — Cuttin’ Grass — Vol. 1 (Butcher Shoppe Sessions) Waxahatchee — Saint Cloud
There is a moment in The Lumineers’ reputation-redefining record, III, when the second and third generation of a drug-addled family pass a hitchhiker on the side of the road.
“You never give a hitcher a ride,” Jimmy Sparks warns his son, Junior, “‘cause it's us or them.”
Jimmy is a product of his alcohol-soaked mother, Gloria. He’s a wreck. All of the pivotal moments of his life seem to happen at 3 a.m. This one’s no exception.
And it’s 3 a.m. again, 20 years later, when Junior reaches his own crossroads. He’s driving alone, the sense from the record that he could still break free, could still snap off his branch of the family tree. He sees, on his way home from his graveyard shift, a beat-up barefoot man at the side of the road. It’s his father, in the latest mess of his own making.
“His old man waved his hands with tears in his eyes / But Jimmy's son just sped up and remembered daddy's advice / No, you don't ever give a hitcher a ride, 'cause it's us or them / ‘Cause it's me or him”
It’s not entirely clear from the song or from the video — one of a series of short films that add a whole other layer to III’’s storytelling — whether Junior recognizes his father or not in that moment. But the lesson seems to be different somehow, not about the dangers of strangers or worse, the pervasive Sparks family selfishness. Instead it seems like healthy self-preservation. Maybe Junior is going to make it out after all.
III is a stunning record with beauty and tragedy and hope — and hooks. It raises The Lumineers — that previously rather disposable toe-tappin’ “Hey Ho” band from Ramsey, New Jersey, one Pitchfork would hardly lower itself to cover — to another level. They were decent but never this good before, and might never be this good again.
In 2019, though, they delivered. The Lumineers’ third record, III, is my 27th annual Album of the Year.
The Lumineers had a ton of competition worth mentioning. Big Thief’s weird and wonderful U.F.O.F. might have cruised to a victory in some other years — and, admittedly, is probably the better record from an objective standpoint. Objective obschmective. The Highwomen’s debut made it possible I’d actually pick an all-female country supergroup. Last year’s winner, Caamp, released a more than fine follow up. Previous winner The Tallest Man on Earth dropped another great one. There was also Sharon Van Etten, Yola, Chromatics and my favorite new artist this year, Jade Bird. And Todd Snider’s Cash Cabin Sessions, Vol. 3 is a delightful mix of humor, melancholy and modern politics.
Of all things, it was a random Twitter post by a Twin Peaks connection that alerted me to The Lumineers’ new one. I’d seen them perform years ago at the Newport Folk Festival and I own their first album, but they never made much of an impression on me. I had no intention of following their career further. Which was why her tweet spoke to me:
“I’ve honestly never been that into this band but this album and its subsequent music videos is amazing,” Melanie Mullen wrote.
I was feeling adventurous, so I gave another shot to what I had concluded was just another ubiquitous MOR rock-folk-Americana fusion band in the vein of the dreaded Mumford and Sons.
But all I needed to do was listen to a brief preview clip of the album’s opening track, “Donna,” and I knew something was different.
As I said to my wife, “You don’t start a concept album with a song this good unless you can back it up.”
They backed it up.
“Donna” is the first of a three-part opening short story about Junior’s grandmother, Gloria. It’s followed by “Life in the City” and “Gloria,” making up the album’s first of three acts, the latter two songs more upbeat musically but certainly not lyrically, painting a picture of an alcoholic mother and the suffering she inflicts on herself and others. It’s not a 2019 story of opioid abuse, but it resonates all the more for it timelessness. And the film clips that accompany the record, by director Kevin Phillips, underscore her tragedy. By the end of her vignette, she’s passing out drunk while holding an infant and then running across a barren field from the scene of a brutal car crash, her bleeding husband left in the passenger seat, yet it’s almost impossible not to sing along as the album’s first single plays around her. That dissonance, like a good Radiohead song, gives “Gloria” all the more power.
Act 2 jumps forward in time to Gloria’s grandson. “It Wasn’t Easy to Be Happy For You” is an identifiable song about a teenage breakup — no history of family addiction needed. When you add the video, though, it becomes particularly poignant. We see a beautiful young girl enchanting Junior on the roof of his car and, later, in the front seat. She’s exciting, provocative. You can feel the limitless possibilities she represents to a young man who doesn’t seem to have all that many. Then she opens the door and saunters her way out of the car into the great wide open. Junior tries to follow her. But the camera pans and, like magic, she’s already gone.
Junior’s mother has also left her father and the next two songs unpack that dynamic, before the record rolls back a generation to his father, Jimmy Sparks, a prison guard trapped in a cell mostly of his own making, his only joy keeping others in their metal cages. It’s even darker than what we’ve heard so far, and brings us to the 3 a.m. moments in the car and elsewhere.
The record, which is a tight 10 songs and 38 minutes long, lands its finish. The chorus on “Salt and the Sea” — a song that shares a little part of its soul with another cleansing cinematic album-closer, “Love Reign O'er Me” — hints at reconciliation with the refrain, “I'll be your friend // In the daylight again,” but of course it’s not nearly as simple as that.
With the family history the Sparks have, it can’t be.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
2018: Caamp -- Boys
For a quarter-century, “August and Everything After” has been a symbol of the unbreakable bond I share with my oldest friend. Shawn and I met a decade before the record was released, as 4-year-olds running around an apartment complex in upstate New York, but we were traveling together in Colorado when the Counting Crows debut was the rage. I recommended he pick it up. He did.
Fast forward nearly another decade, and we’re in a biker bar in Hagerstown, Maryland. We’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, and they’ve let us set up our tents in the grass outside. Beer and bar snacks never taste better than when you’ve been trudging up and down mountains in the summer heat for days on end. Music never sounds better.
One of us found “August and Everything After” on the jukebox. It’s likely a bit apocryphal, a shared myth we like to repeat, but I swear we played the whole damn album. “I know every single word,” one of us said, and, as the story goes, we proved it. Whether it was the whole album, or half, or just a couple songs, we belted it all out, not missing a beat.
We were 23 and singing along to my first Album of the Year; “August and Everything After” was the very reason I decided, as a 15-year-old in 1993, to start naming an Album of the Year each winter. I needed a way to name how special it was to me.
When I turned 40 this summer, we went to Nashville to celebrate. We played “Anna Begins” in the wee hours of the morning at the house a group of us had rented for the occasion. But Shawn and I had a new record to bond over, too, to sing along with in Music City, a record I’d discovered that had immediately made me think of Shawn. He was on assignment in Honduras when I sent it to him.
He loved it. I loved it. We love it.
And so my Album of the Year comes full circle. Twenty-five years later, Caamp’s “Boys” — a record that screams Shawn to me — is my 2018 Album of the Year.
Caamp, who I saw this summer at the Newport Folk Festival, are a group of 20-something lifelong friends, but I swear they didn’t look a day over 15, at least not banjo player/backup singer Evan Westfall. They were the first act of the day, and don’t play with the gravitas of a guy like Charlie Parr, or the inventiveness of Loma, whose debut record is my Album of the Year runner-up, but they play music that strips away cynicism. Songs for the morning, to open the window curtains to. Songs about new love and enduring friendship.
Some years I feel like quoting lyrics endlessly in these columns. And I could do that. It’s certainly deserving. But this time, there’s only one line I feel like repeating, a line that brings me back to bars with Shawn, or in the woods, or in canoes, dealing with broken hearts and family hardships, or even to a tiny mound of dirt near a fence corner that seemed so big to us as kids we called it Memory Hill and invented a million games to play on it.
“Don’t let yourself go crazy, you’re good for another round,” is the line. “It’s only love — and it hurts.”
It’s a song of comfort. It’s a song called “Song for a Friend.”
The old magic never dies.
Past winners:
1993: Counting Crows -- August and Everything After
1994: R.E.M. -- Monster
1995: The Innocence Mission -- Glow
1996: Dave Matthews Band -- Crash
1997: U2 -- Pop
1998: R.E.M. -- Up
1999: John Linnell -- State Songs
2000: Radiohead -- Kid A
2001: Bjork -- Vespertine
2002: Wilco -- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2003: Bonnie "Prince" Billy -- Master and Everyone
2004: Wilco -- A Ghost is Born
2005: Sufjan Stevens -- Illinois
2006: The Decemberists -- The Crane Wife
2007: Radiohead -- In Rainbows
2008: Shearwater -- Rook
2009: Animal Collective -- Merriweather Post Pavilion
2010: Laura Veirs -- July Flame
2011: PJ Harvey -- Let England Shake
2012: Animal Collective -- Centipede Hz
2013: Mogwai -- Les Revenants
2014: Sun Kil Moon -- Benji
2015: The Tallest Man On Earth -- Dark Bird is Home
2016: Bon Iver -- 22, A Million
2017: Bjork -- Utopia
Records I Buy is a music blog based in Astoria, NY, with foreign offices in Brooklyn, NY and Vienna, Austria.
Among RIB's all-time favorite artists: The Innocence Mission, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Neil Young, R.E.M., Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), Bjork, Frank Sinatra, Wilco, Joni Mitchell, Ella Fitzgerald, Louie Armstrong, Leonard Cohen, Led Zeppelin, The Cure, The Smiths, Gillian Welch, They Might Be Giants, Maria Callas, Nick Drake and Simon & Garfunkel.
Records I Buy loves many albums you hate, like R.E.M.'s Monster and Neil Young's Trans. You can kiss Records I Buy's ass if you have a problem with that.
No! Unwinnable was there! Unwinnable danced! Unwinnable cried! Unwinnable did not write about it!
